Congratulations! With the tools and online services from the previous ten posts, you now have the basic equipment to work as a freelance translator. This does not mean that you now have a perfectly and completely equipped home office. But it is a start.
All the following posts will give you more free tools and services or the best and most inexpensive alternatives we can find. You are also welcome to suggest tools and services that could be useful for a freelancer.
If this is the first post you see from our site and want to start creating a home office for yourself, then you might want to start with the first post and walk through this site until you arrive here.
Again, Congratulations!
We wish you great success!
Some words of caution
In every job, there is much to consider when taking on the job of a translator. The most important question is, of course, if you have the skills. For a translator, you will need to have an excellent level of expertise in your native language. Your native language will be the one you are translating into. For your second language, you need a near-native level. You can not translate from a language that you don’t understand very well. You might think that what I just wrote is self-evident. Unfortunately, I came across a bunch of people who thought differently.
Another important point is that you should choose a field in which you have some expertise. For example, if you have been working in the field of electronics before, then it would be a good idea to do technical translations and stay away from legal translations.
The third point, be professional. This has several meanings. If you think you are offered a job that you can not do because it is beyond your skills, then don’t do it (Code of Ethics). Delivering bad translations would harm your reputation and can harm the business of your client. Also, stay away from content that seems offensive, legally questionable, or seems to raise other moral issues with you.
At last, don’t sell yourself undervalued. You might think you have a better chance of getting a job by selling cheap. This is not true. You will look unprofessional, and your client will question your quality.
